like ripping butterfly wings
by mkkkkng
Summary: "And what makes you think we'll be the best?" Kuroko, Kagami, and the pieces and fragments that hold them together. A quick character study-drabble-nonsense thoughts piece with too many semicolons, as per usual.


A/N: I totally made up their birthdays/ages, but at this point I could really care less.

_like ripping butterfly wings (airborne)_

_(and what makes you sure that we'll be the best?)_

_i. _

Kuroko is sixteen and already world-weary; Kagami is seventeen and still a child. It belies their appearances, that—but as Kise says, opposites attract—and while they ignore him (Kuroko, turning away and looking back to his book, listening with a hidden smile on his face as Kagami mutters something or other in English and grabs Kise's ears and _pulls_), it makes sense. Kuroko, the invisible boy, who remains the same size he was in middle school, who can only master his own style of basketball—next to Kagami, who is a giant among giants, the one who defies miracles and laughs as he does so. Kuroko and Kagami make up the best team in Japan not despite, but because they are so different: because they are each other's negative space, the answers to each other's fill-in-the-blanks, and the universe wouldn't have it any other way.

_ii._

When he is nine, Kuroko finds a book in the back of the public library. _Peter Pan, _the cover reads: pretty gold lettering engraved into the black leather surface, covered in a thin layer of dust. It is a thin book, sandwiched inconspicuously between a book of fairy tales and a boisterous novel about dragon slayers, but Kuroko has always been good at finding small things like that—things no one else seems to see.

The words are simple, and the story simpler; but Kuroko ignores the tales of pirates and lost children, of the love story between Peter and Wendy, and focuses his attention on a different detail: on the shadow.

That is the day he realizes what he is—the day he figures out why everyone forgets to pick him during gym class, and why no one asks him to be their drawing partner in art class. Because he is a shadow. Kuroko is a shadow without a body to which to attach.

He is still invisible; but now, he is searching. Because he is still incomplete.

_iii._

Aomine doesn't know how to feel over Kagami's skill. After all, he's been there before: destroying everything in his path, reveling in the excitement of victory as he climbs quickly and steadily to the king's throne. It's exhilarating, Aomine knows; but he also knows the pain it brings afterward, once everything to be accomplished has already been accomplished. Once there is nothing else to defeat but the deathly hatred of being the best.

But that's why Aomine won't lose: for Kagami. And while he says it's because he won't let some red-haired foreigner defeat him in _his _game, he knows that's only half of it. His reasons are changed now; his motivations are changed. And though of course Aomine still plays basketball for himself _(because Aomine is still selfish, always selfish—after all, there's a limit to how much one can change)_; it's different now, deeper. Aomine plays basketball so he can stay at the top, stay above Kagami—so Kagami won't have to experience the hatred he did. He won't let Kagami hate something he loves.

Kagami is sixteen and still a child; Aomine hopes he stays that way forever.

_iv._

Kuroko knows they are different: Kagami, who soars through the skies with the ferocity of lightning, is a dragon who cannot be captured, a tiger that cannot be tamed. They are different in ways that are obvious even to the most indifferent of passerby, as dissimilar as fire and rain; and yet,every time Kuroko reaches out his fingers, Kagami is there, waiting to catch them, envelop them in his own. Every time Kuroko closes his eyes and breathes in, he feels the warmth of Kagami's skin, the heat from the fire of his hair, and knows he's there and always will be.

Perhaps that was why Teiko didn't survive, Kuroko thinks: because they didn't _want_ to survive. Miracles could never be tamed, after all; and Kuroko's paper cage burned to ashes and crumbled to dust when he tried to tighten the bars and keep them together.

Kagami, however, is different: a different kind of fire. A miracle against miracles, a rejecter of gravity. Kagami stays because he wants to stay, and that's how Kuroko knows it'll last.

* * *

_(because the world wouldn't have it any other way.)_


End file.
